The ObamaCare Website – The Biggest Tech Gaggle Ever?

Wow . The Techies are even taking note of this colossal Gubment Gravy historic failure from our historic first black President. LINK

quote:This is really playing out as a clinic in how not to launch a major website project, failing in every respect across the board, from planning, to the communications, to testing and everything in between. Can you think of anything in history of the web that was worse? This is the government of course and history indicates that the exchange was probably built by a number of the cheapest available contractors through a bidding program, that is actually pretty close, but just wait until you hear about the money. The contractors behind the exchange were CGI Federal, who built the site, Quality Software Systems Inc. (CSSI) – a Canadian company that built the information hub, and Booz Allen who is responsible for enrollment and eligibility technical support. Somewhere in that soup of contractors, they built a site that – /wait for it/ – was built for 50,000 to 60,000 concurrent users at a total cost (so far) of $634 million. Feel free to replay that ratio. $634,000,000/50,000. Here’s another ratio to ponder – 50,000 users in 50 states. I guess if you can get the work….you do it. In this case unfortunately for many the product is downright poor.

re: The ObamaCare Website – The Biggest Tech Gaggle Ever?(Posted by SlowFlowPro on 10/11/13 at 7:50 am to Lsupimp)

quote:That alone is a massive bungle, but it does get worse, it appears however this thing was designed, the site is essentially pulling a Denial of Service attack on itself. Yeah.

One possible cause of the problems is that hitting “apply” on HealthCare.gov causes 92 separate files, plug-ins and other mammoth swarms of data to stream between the user’s computer and the servers powering the government website, said Matthew Hancock, an independent expert in website design. He was able to track the files being requested through a feature in the Firefox browser.

Of the 92 he found, 56 were JavaScript files, including plug-ins that make it easier for code to work on multiple browsers (such as Microsoft Corp’s Internet Explorer and Google Inc’s Chrome) and let users upload files to HealthCare.gov.

It is not clear why the upload function was included.

“They set up the website in such a way that too many requests to the server arrived at the same time,” Hancock said.

i'm almost hoping there is something nefarious in all of that information exchange, to explain why it exists

re: The ObamaCare Website – The Biggest Tech Gaggle Ever?(Posted by MMauler on 10/11/13 at 9:19 am to Lsupimp)

quote:This is really playing out as a clinic in how not to launch a major website project, failing in every respect across the board, from planning, to the communications, to testing and everything in between.

And, I'd bet, BY FAR the absolute most expensive launch in the brief history of the internet.

re: The ObamaCare Website – The Biggest Tech Gaggle Ever?(Posted by DeltaDoc on 10/11/13 at 10:05 am to MMauler)

What is funny is that the government cannot get this right, after spending hundreds of millions over three years, yet the lib/progs think they will be great at handling and improving healthcare for everyone under single payer.

re: The ObamaCare Website – The Biggest Tech Gaggle Ever?(Posted by Jbird on 10/11/13 at 10:07 am to DeltaDoc)

quote:What is funny is that the government cannot get this right, after spending hundreds of millions over three years, yet the lib/progs think they will be great at handling and improving healthcare for everyone under single payer.

son of arloAlabama FanState of InnocenceMember since Sep 20134577 posts

re: The ObamaCare Website – The Biggest Tech Gaggle Ever?(Posted by son of arlo on 10/11/13 at 10:09 am to Layabout)

This is a real head scratcher fer sure. The app I currently support handles ~8mil transactions per day, with peaks of around 750k per hour. The setup is one Solaris E3k (yep, basic Flintstone tech right there) as a load balancer, two Solaris M5ks as front end servers, another wheezing E3k for a back end, and 4 M5Ks running an Oracle Golden Gate DB which constantly replicates itself and updates with 60 other DBs. The nominal time for one transaction is 40 millisecs, and people start freaking when there's a 120 second delay.

It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek Next Generation where a pathetic civilization acheived a modicum of success by stealing technology from other cultures. They kidnapped Jordie because their ship was broken, and in their words, "We are not smart. We cannot make it go." I weep for the tragic low state our nation has come to tech-wise.

re: The ObamaCare Website – The Biggest Tech Gaggle Ever?(Posted by Lsupimp on 10/11/13 at 10:10 am to DeltaDoc)

quote:lib/progs think

This is where you lost me. They don't think anything. They BELIEVE. They believe in a mystical religious Orthodox fundamentalist way that State Control will be the cure for everything. It's a near-mystical faith.

re: The ObamaCare Website – The Biggest Tech Gaggle Ever?(Posted by MMauler on 10/11/13 at 10:11 am to son of arlo)

quote: The setup is one Solaris E3k (yep, basic Flintstone tech right there) as a load balancer, two Solaris M5ks as front end servers, another wheezing E3k for a back end, and 4 M5Ks running an Oracle Golden Gate DB which constantly replicates itself and updates with 60 other DBs.

son of arloAlabama FanState of InnocenceMember since Sep 20134577 posts

re: The ObamaCare Website – The Biggest Tech Gaggle Ever?(Posted by son of arlo on 10/11/13 at 10:36 am to MMauler)

There's a guy in Hoover who could take one look at the code and fix it. The standard guideline is that one programmer can only comprehend ~1k lines of code. I wrote a program that parsed a requirements doc and created about 600 C classes/methods and "The Dude" found an error in line 110k. I stand in awe before people like this.

He's a devout Christian, so I doubt he'll be engaged to fix the Obamacare mess.